European stocks slid, completing their first weekly decline since January, as Russia’s threat to cut off Ukraine’s gas prompted investors to hold back.

The standoff overshadowed a report that showed the US economy created more jobs last month than forecast. The Labor Department figures showed US employers added 175,000 jobs in February, exceeding median estimates of 149,000 recorded in a Bloomberg survey.

DUBLIN
Most of the major stocks declined as the market trundled into the weekend, with building materials group
CRH
, the biggest stock on the Iseq index, closing down 2.75 per cent at €20.50 despite positive indicators from the US construction markets in which it is active.

On a day of mixed fortunes for airline stocks,
Ryanair
finished down 2.1 per cent to €7.34, while
Bank of Ireland, Kingspan, C&C
and
Smurfit Kappa
were also among the fallers.

Agri-food company
Origin Enterprises
posted a 2.3 per cent climb to €7.55, while
AIB
continued its advance from Thursday’s session, closing up 7 per cent at 17 cent.

Resources group
Kenmare
, which publishes its full-year results next Wednesday, rose 2.1 per cent to 19 cent.

LONDON
The FTSE 100 slipped 1.1 per cent, finishing off the blue-chip index’s second week of decline as investors feared the situation in Ukraine may worsen.

Mining stocks led the decline. A gauge of basic-resources companies sank 3.5 per cent, the biggest drop among 19 industry groups in the Stoxx Europe 600 index.

Getinge
slumped 21 per cent to 182.80 kronor. The Swedish maker of sterilisation systems forecast first-quarter pretax profit of 160 million kronor, roughly a quarter of the average analyst estimate.

Fugro
declined 2.1 per cent to €40.83. The Dutch deepwater-oilfield surveyor posted revenue of €2.42 billion for last year, less than the €2.63 billion that analysts had estimated.

Airbus Group
dropped 3.1 per cent to €51.31. British Airways said one of its Airbus jets suffered an engine surge during a flight to France, forcing the pilot to return to London’s Heathrow airport. The UK’s flag carrier has 33 of the A319 narrow-body planes in its fleet.

Air France-KLM
climbed 4.4 per cent to €10.40, rising for the fourth day to its highest price since July 2011. Europe’s largest airline said it flew 5.34 million passengers in February, a 1.8 per cent increase from a year earlier.